Pleskbackup fails when dumping data

[Snoken]

I'm trying to move all of our clients from one server to another and nothing seems to be working.

First I tried the Migration Manager, and that's really not an option. We have approx 100+ websites on this server and PMM takes at least 30 minutes per website. The total downtime has to be below 2 hours.

Second I tried to use pleskbackup/pleskrestore and that's where all the fun began. First off, dump the entire system, that would certainly had been a slick solution to the problem but...

# pleskbackup --all /tmp/totaldump.bak -v -v
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Backup started (136 client(s), 153 domain(s))
Start date: Wed Oct 31 14:23:33 2007
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phase 1/2: collecting information
...
Phase 2/2: packing data
backup_sign: Error writing dump to file
System error 32: Broken pipe
*END

My first thought was that I was out of diskspace, so I changed the command to make 200MB-files and store them on a remote FTP server. Well, that failed misserably with the same error messages:

backup_sign: Error writing dump to file
System error 32: Broken pipe

Ok, damn it, let's try another approach. I can transfer the databases and websites manually with mysqldump and rsync. All I need is to dump the system settings and restore them on the new server:

# pleskbackup --all /tmp/systemdump.bak -no-content -v -v
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Backup started (136 client(s), 153 domain(s))
Start date: Wed Oct 31 15:36:01 2007
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phase 1/2: collecting information
...
Phase 2/2: packing data
backup_sign: Error writing dump to file
System error 32: Broken pipe
*END

Has anybody else experienced these problems? Has anybody, not only experienced these problems but solved them too? I'm getting deperate, any feedback would be highly appreciated.

 

[Snoken]

Well, there seems to be a huge difference in parameters between the commandline utilities and the documentation. The backup commands in my first post are illegal and should not work.

Never the less, after reading the command line documentation I came up with the following command:

/opt/psa/bin/pleskbackup -v -v -s200M all ftp://user[email protected]/071101.bak

Which goes down in flames with the famous:

Phase 2/2: packing data
backup_sign: Error writing dump to file
System error 32: Broken pipe

Back to square one. Right now I'm trying to do the dump with standard split size (2G) and with compression turned off. We'll see how it turns out.

 

[Snoken]

When one problem is solved - BANG - you run your head right in to a new one. The backup/restore utilities are really annoying, am I the only one in the entire universe who can't handle them?

I gave up all efforts to backup the entire server and finally I managed to backup just the server settings without the content:

/opt/psa/bin/pleskbackup -v -v -z -c all config.bak

What a relief, like a happy little camper I transferred this file to the new server and started the process to restore it. Well, that should be a pretty straight forward experience but no.

/opt/psa/bin/pleskrestore --create-map config.bak -map config.bak.map
WARNING: Backup file has wrong signature for this server

WTF, "wrong signature" well it's just a warning it can't be that serious. Let's validate the file:

/opt/psa/bin/pleskrestore --validate-map config.bak.map
## ERROR in line 1034: IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx does not belong to target client's 'pod' IP pool

COME ON... What's you major malfunction? I checked the map file and the IP mappings are correct according to the Administrator Guide, and the rest of the file seems OK too. Let's try a restore, it's possible that it's only the validation that bails out:

/opt/psa/bin/pleskrestore --restore config.bak -map config.bak.map -level server -license -verbose
## ERROR in line 1034: IP address 193.13.74.56 does not belong to target client's 'pod' IP pool

This is no longer a quest for transferring data between servers it's a religious experience. I'll probably waste a few more days banging my self senseless with this **** but after that...

How do you uninstall Plesk from a server, is it possible?

 

[Snoken]

I apologize for my own stupidity, the validation error I refered to above was an error in the generated mapping file on line 1034. It was easily corrected and now the restore seems to be working.

It's not a full restore though, only configuration, clients and domains. No content whatsoever but that's a totally different matter.

I must thank the Plesk Support team for their excellent contributions to solving this problem. Their instant responses to this thread really made a difference.